Spider-Man: Edge of Time Review

Not really worth anyone's time.

Oh what a tangle web we weave, when first we practise to deceive. That sentiment, sadly, also applies to Edge of Time. It fails rather spectacularly to capitalise upon the potential of last year's Shattered Dimensions. Despite coming from the same developer, Beenox, it unstitches most of the things Shattered Dimensions did so well, creating a game that is in so many respects an unworthy follow-up.

Whilst not a direct sequel to Shattered Dimensions, Edge of Time follows two of its protagonists – The Amazing Spider-Man and Spider-Man 2099. And the plot is fairly straightforward. In 2099, crazed scientist Walker Sloan, using experimental technology, travels back in time to establish the nefarious Alchemax corporation back in the 1970's.

He succeeds and time splinters, creating an alternate universe. In the process the original Peter Parker dies at the tentacular hands of Anti-Venom. So Spider-Man 2099 dragoons Peter Parker from the new, alternate timeline to help him rectify reality. Got it? Although this may read like an epic backdrop for a game, with the fate of the universe and the life of Spider-Man himself at stake, the way in which it is rendered makes it feel anything but.

Instead, you spend most of your time blindly brawling through garishly-lit laboratories and web-slinging down the drab corridors of Alchemax, performing the most trivial actions. You deactivate switches. You destroy generators. You collect keys. It's the obscene banality of these tasks, and their seemingly interchangeable nature, that really undermines the scope and grandeur of the plot. Having to do the same things over and over quickly disengages you from what could have been a dramatic premise.

At one point, in a characteristic aside, Amazing Spider-Man wryly jests after doing something three times, "What is this? A video game?" Does the game then proceed to deconstruct this most cliched of gaming tropes? Nope. In fact the level design is crammed full of such devices, which arduously expand the game's running time to a meagre 7 hours. One of the most irritating ways in which it does this is the spontaneous 'teleportation' of enemies into an area (it is the future after all.) So wave after wave of robots or masked goons appear out of thin air, retarding your progress. Although you can often relieve the tedium by exiting an area without defeating the hordes of enemies, it's almost a tacit admission from the game that it should have let you out of a particular area by now.